Amber laughed nervously. “No, no. I just want to get it over with. It’s been eating away at me. What do you say to someone whose father you basically killed?”
“You didn’t kill Jeremy Rafferty,” Josie said softly.
Amber stared out the window. Her ordeal with Gabriel had left a long scar on her palm. The fingers of her other hand caressed it. “If I hadn’t lied,” she said. “If I had stood up to my father. If I had just said something, anything, and not gone along with it, he would be alive today.”
“You were a fifteen-year-old kid,” Josie said. “Raised by people who lied as easily as they breathed. It was an impossible situation, Amber.”
Still, her eyes tracked the snow-covered houses creeping past as Josie drew closer to Devon Rafferty’s home. “When you are raised to lie, you don’t know any other way. I was going to give you that list eventually, though. The one in my diary. After what happened with Dr. Rafferty, I used that diary to keep track of all the horrible things that my mom and dad and Aunt Nadine did, all the people they lied to and cheated. I thought that no one would even notice the diary. It was so childish for a fifteen-year-old. But Aunt Nadine sniffed it out. Nothing ever got past her. It’s a miracle that she bought mine and Eden’s story about ‘getting rid’ of the baby. Or maybe she didn’t. I don’t know. But she found the diary and read it, and she was absolutely livid. She tore all the pages out and burned them and told me that if I ever tried to expose the family, she’d kill me. Just like she killed Dr. Rafferty.”
Josie’s foot hit the brake and the car slid, fishtailing slightly on the snowy road. Both their bodies jerked forward and back. Turning to Amber, she said, “What?”
Tears filled Amber’s eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “She only ever said it that one time, only to me. I had no idea if she was telling the truth or if she just said that to freak me out. At that time, the news was saying it was a suicide. The police investigation confirmed that. I never knew whether to believe her or not. I didn’t know if she really somehow got him into that river, or if she just said that to me to put doubt in my mind, to scare me, but it worked. I was terrified after that.”
Behind them, headlights appeared. A truck lumbered toward them. Josie put her blinkers on and pulled toward the side of the road, giving the other vehicle enough room to go around them. “Maybe Dr. Rafferty threatened to expose your family,” Josie said. “And she was telling the truth—they killed him to keep him quiet. Too bad we can’t ask your father.”
One of the things that still kept Josie awake at night about the case was that Hugo Watts had left the Eudora hotel after the debacle at Rectify Megachurch on Christmas Eve and disappeared into thin air. Amber had told them that no one would ever see him again. He had socked away at least half of all the wealth that Lydia had accumulated during her marriages, and likely had always had a plan to disappear if the police ever caught on to anything he had done. Although at this point, the statute of limitations on just about everything he’d done was long past. He couldn’t be prosecuted for fraud or theft by extortion. But if he had had a hand in Jeremy Rafferty’s murder and it could be proven somehow, he could still go to prison for that.
Amber said, “The fact that my dad ran makes me think that Aunt Nadine was telling the truth about killing Dr. Rafferty.”
Josie said, “You need to tell Devon all of this. She never believed her father killed himself. She needs to hear it. I know you don’t want to do this, but it might be more beneficial to both of you than you can imagine right now. What happened after Nadine destroyed the diary? Is that when you made the list of numbers, or did you make them right before you went missing?”
Amber wiped away her tears. Josie pulled the car back onto the road. “Back then,” Amber said, “Eden and I were living with Aunt Nadine during the pregnancy. Her real estate paperwork was easily available. I started by going through it and writing down all the addresses, but then Eden was afraid that she’d find those, too, and go off the deep end. So then we came up with this plan to write the parcel ID numbers down so we’d always have them in case we needed them. We always talked about exposing them when we became adults, but then Dr. Rafferty died and Eden got pregnant with Thatcher Toland’s baby and by the time we were on our own, all either of us wanted to do was forget the past and start over. Plus, exposing them meant exposing ourselves. We had had a baby and we’d given it away. That felt so wrong. We were both afraid. Even after Eden called me, a couple of weeks before all hell broke loose, we were afraid.”
Josie said, “It seems like you two were close, but you hadn’t spoken to Eden in almost ten years before she called you.”
Amber sighed. “We were close when we were kids because we had to be. When I first left for college, we tried to see one another. She met me a few times for lunch and dinner but it wasn’t the same. It was like… being with each other just brought back every horrible thing we’d done and every horrible thing we’d witnessed. It wasn’t enjoyable. It was depressing. We were reminders to one another of the worst things we’d ever done. We mutually agreed that it would be best to go our separate ways. The next time I heard from her was when she called me to say that Thatcher had contacted her and that she had told him about the baby.”
“Why did she call you?” Josie asked. “Because Thatcher had approached her?”
“Yes. She wanted me to know that he had ‘made amends,’” Amber said, a note of disgust in her tone. “I can’t believe Eden bought his crap, but she went in for it hook, line, and sinker. She even told him about the baby, and we swore that neither of us would ever, ever talk about that. To anyone. I was so upset. At first she said it wasn’t a big deal; that we shouldn’t worry about it. You know, Thatcher was the one with everything to lose. She had unburdened herself to him about the baby and our family and everything they did to other people, and she felt like a new person. She was so sure that the secret would be safe with him.”
“But it wasn’t,” said Josie.
“The first time I realized that Thatcher wasn’t going to keep the secret was when Gabriel came to see me. He told me that I had to tell him where the child was or that there would be some serious repercussions. I knew then that Thatcher had no intention of keeping quiet about the baby. In fact, he wanted to find his child; that much was obvious. Nothing good could come from him finding that child. I was afraid…”
She trailed off and finally looked over at Josie.
Josie said, “You were afraid he’d kill the child. Eliminate the threat to his reputation.”
“His wealth,” Amber said. “My parents, Aunt Nadine, Vivian Toland? All they ever cared about was wealth.”